Lion of civil rights fight who took mantle to Congress
ATLANTA — John Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, has died. He was 80.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Lewis’ passing late Friday night, calling him “one of the greatest heroes of American history.”
“May his memory be an inspiration that moves us all to, in the face of injustice, make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble,’ ” Pelosi said, invoking a signature quote and guiding principle of Lewis.
The condolences for Lewis were bipartisan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Lewis was
“a pioneering civil rights leader who put his life on the line to fight racism, promote equal rights, and bring our nation into greater alignment with its founding principles. ”
Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that had the greatest impact on the movement. He was best known for leading some 600 protesters in the
Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council. He won his seat in Congress in 1986.
He met bipartisan success in Congress in 2006 when he led efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court later invalidated much of the law, and it became once again what it was in his youth, a work in progress. Later, when the presidency of Donald Trump challenged his civil rights legacy, Lewis made no effort to hide his pain.
Lewis said he’d been arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five more as a congressman.
“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something,” he said in a speech earlier this year.